(Winner of the 1919 Pulitzer Prize) The grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams, historian Henry Adams was more drawn to scholarship than to politics. His autobiography—wry, self-effacing, and written in the third person as though Adams were an observer of himself—is a landmark in American literature, ranked by the Modern Library as the greatest nonfiction book in English of the 20th century. Reflecting his constant search for order and unity in a world he regarded as teetering on the brink of self-destruction, Adams casts himself as a modern everyman, seeking coherence in a fragmented universe and concluding that his education was inadequate for the demands of the rapidly changing world. This edition includes an introduction from former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall.